qsynth - A fluidsynth Qt GUI Interface

Qsynth is a fluidsynth GUI front-end application written in C++ around the Qt framework using Qt Designer. Eventually it may evolve into a softsynth management application allowing the user to control and manage a variety of command line softsynths but for the moment it wraps the excellent FluidSynth (http://www.fluidsynth.org).

FluidSynth is a command line software synthesiser based on the Soundfont specification.

Homepage: http://qsynth.sourceforge.net

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Requirements

The software requirements for build and runtime are listed as follows:

Mandatory:

• Qt framework, C++ class library and tools for cross-platform application and UI development http://qt.io/

• fluidsynth, real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications http://www.fluidsynth.org/

Installation

The installation procedure follows the standard for source distributions. Unpack the tarball and in the extracted source directory:

./configure [--prefix=/usr/local]
make

and optionally as root:

make install

This procedure will end installing the following files:

${prefix}/bin/qsynth
${prefix}/share/pixmaps/qsynth.png
${prefix}/share/applications/qsynth.desktop
${prefix}/share/locale/qsynth_*.qm

Just launch ${prefix}/bin/qsynth and you're off (hopefully).

Note that the default installation path ${prefix} is /usr/local.

If you're checking out from Git, you'll have to prepare the configure script just before you proceed with the above instructions:

./autogen.sh

Configuration

Qsynth holds its settings and configuration state per user, in a file located as $HOME/.config/rncbc.org/Qsynth.conf . Normally, there's no need to edit this file, as it is recreated and rewritten everytime qsynth is run.

Bugs

Plenty still although this is beta software ;)

Support

Qsynth is open source free software. For bug reports, feature requests, discussion forums, mailling lists, or any other matter related to the development of this piece of software, please use the Sourceforge project page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/qsynth).

Acknowledgements

Qsynth has been created by Rui Nuno Capela, Richard Bown and Chris Cannam to bring a simple but effective software synthesier front end to the Linux desktop. From an original idea by Richard Bown and Chris Cannam to create an open software synthesiser front end to use in conjunction with Rosegarden (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/rosegarden) and other ALSA based software sequencers.

Inspired by Rui's work on QjackCtl (http://qjackctl.sourceforge.net).

Ebrahim Mayat <ebmayat at mac dot com> also contributed with instructions to build Qsynth on Mac OSX (see README-OSX). This might be outdated now that Qsynth has migrated to Qt4, but nevertheless...

Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas is currently the most prominent developer, having contributed with the awesome knob skins/styles option, the alternate cmake build system and the Windows(tm) installer bundle. Kudos to Pedro!

Enjoy.

rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela <rncbc at rncbc dot org> bownie aka Richard Bown <bownie at bownie dot com> cannam aka Chris Cannam <cannam at all dash day dash breakfast dot com>